


Paper Over It

by beltsquid



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Bungie Please Name Mithrax's Guardian Friends, Festival of the Lost (Destiny), Gen, House of Light, Mithrax's Fireteam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 18:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21480541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beltsquid/pseuds/beltsquid
Summary: Mithrax gets an unexpected crash course in City tradition from a member of his fireteam.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 64





	Paper Over It

Mithrax sits cloaked at the jagged edge of one of the many cracks that are splitting open the surface of Luna and watches his brethren die. They die to Hive. They die to Vex. They die to Guardians. They die to the things that emerge from the veiny red energy that gathers around the surface. They die to each other. Battle and death and loss has shaped his life ever since he emerged a soft-shelled thing in a hard universe. He can stomach the death, but wishes that his people could aspire to something more than thinly-won survival on the haunted scraps of a dead and cursed moon.

A Guardian peels his sparrow away from the well-worn path along Archer’s Line and barrels in his direction. Mithrax is not worried. It is his Hunter. He slides into a stop and raises his armored wrist to his helmet.

“I’m at the rendezvous point, buddy. You here?” The Guardian’s voice echoes in his comm. His Ghost notices the echo first and turns its blue eye to his position. 

“Oh! Nice inviz,” the Hunter says, and gets off the sparrow. Mithrax re-positions himself lower on the slope so that he’s not in an immediate sight line before he disables his stealth skin. He has to hunker down to his haunches again for his eyes to level with the Hunter’s helmet. They remain such tiny things, humans. 

“You say you have something I must see?,” he asks.

“Yeah! You’re not gonna believe this!” He flicks the hood of his cloak down to his shoulders and starts digging through his satchel, removing a paper mask that he proceeds to strap over his helmet with a thin bit of string. Mithrax finds himself staring at a strange, angular approximation of his own face.

“Not understanding this,” Mithrax grumbles.

“You’re a festival mask this year! That means you’re famous in the Tower,” he says, his voice pitched in the way that Mithrax has come to know means that he is excited.

“Ah. This is … good? I do not know this festival,” Mithrax tilts his head in wonder. When it comes to the children of Earth, he is familiar only with the ways of the Reef, not of the City.

“Festival of the Lost is the time of year when we remember the dead. We wear masks and give each other candy and stuff.” He shrugs. “Eva says it’s a mix of Old Earth traditions.”

“I do not understand. I am not one of the dead.”

“No, the masks aren’t of the dead. At least, not all the time,” he says. “A lot of times it’s dead bad guys like Crota or Oryx or Skolas…”

The Guardian’s Ghost bobbles close to his Chosen’s masked face.

“I don’t think you’re helping,” it says.

“It’s not all bad guys,” the Hunter throws his hands up in front of him, palms forward. An informal gesture of placation. “It’s also friends like Saladin, Shaxx, or Eris!”

“Does your City think I’m friend? Or enemy?”

“I know you’re our friend so I just assumed…” his posture slumps forward, and Mithrax finds it thoroughly silly to see his face stuck to an almost completely alien gesture. “Now that I think of it … I guess I’m not sure what they think.”

“They know in time. We show them together.”

“Yeah.” The Hunter agrees. He slides the mask to the side and looks at him through his helmet. “Um. Do you wanna celebrate the festival with me? I picked up a bunch of masks at the Tower, so…”

“I already wear my face,” Mithrax protests, gurgling through his rebreather.

“I got different ones, see? I picked the ones that look okay cut in half so you can stick them to your big ol' fancy helmet.” The Hunter pulls a stack from his satchel and places them one by one onto the dusty Lunar surface. He recognizes Cabal, Hive, Vex, Awoken, and Human faces. With his secondary arms, he picks the cardboard visage of a Hive acolyte out of the dust. Details of the creature’s face are technically accurate: he can see that it is a picture that has been mapped onto the crude three dimensional sculpt of planes of paper. Yet it lacks the visceral ferocity of a live Hive soldier. It is a cheap imitation. A parody. A joke.

Mithrax thinks he understands this City festival a little, now. They wear these things to confront the hardness of the world with laughter. Sjur would appreciate the spirit of it, he thinks, and wonders which mask would have suited her.

He will never know, because she is long dead.

He shakes the dust off the acolyte mask and places it over his face. It’s a terrible fit—too small, not enough holes to see through, and they’re cut in the wrong places. He grimaces inside his helmet and pulls it away.

“Nama.”

“I have an idea. Just lemme help,” the Hunter says, plucking the mask from Mithrax’s claws. Even though he styles himself as a very different sort of Kell, his Eliksni crew would never be so bold. Even his other Guardian, the Warlock, is much more deferential. She has told him that this sort of impulsiveness is just how Hunters are.

In another time, Mithrax would have opened the man’s belly with his shock blade for stealing something from his hands, but now he waits patiently if confused while the Hunter stands over him on the tips of his boots with a roll of adhesive paper he’s taken from his bag. He smooths the mask over the crown of Mithrax’s helm and glues it down with the paper. He belatedly remembers that it’s called “tape” and that it’s a singularly bad tool for ship repair. He won’t have to worry about undoing his companion’s handiwork; it will surely fall apart on its own in due time.

“We’ll make a Captain-sized one for you next year,” he says, patting the mask. It makes a hollow sound that echoes through the helm and into his ears.

“Eia. Look … good?” Mithrax cocks his head, imagining himself a creature with two heads and seven eyes and still not entirely sure of what his Hunter is going for, here.

“No,” the Hunter says confidently. “But it’s all for fun, so it doesn’t matter.” He puts the mask of Mithrax’s face away and picks up a mask of a Hive witch from the dirt.

“We’re hunting Hive today, right? Then I’ll be Hive too,” he says, and ties it over his helmet. He becomes a small, spindly, many squat-fingered spoof of the things that rise and shriek from the Dark, and Mithrax allows himself a small measure of hissing laughter. He’s not often prone to that, but when he does laugh, his Hunter is usually involved.

“We hunt,” he agrees, rising to his full height and brandishing his swords.

His little Hunter finishes retrieving his festival masks from the dirt and together they carefully make their way to where the monsters that whisper to the Dark seep onto the moon’s surface. They will die on swords and knives and ethertech and cannons and Light. Perhaps their work will let his people live long enough today to aspire to something more tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote this at the beginning of FoTL because I was so excited about the Mithrax mask, but got stuck on trying to parse out his strange syntax (he conjugates "to be" in a way that I don't fully understand). I never really got there, but wanted to get it up before the event technically ends, anyway.


End file.
